Mengele was born on March
16th, 1911. His early years seemed normal - he was deemed to be an intelligent
and popular person in his home town. After leaving school, Mengele went to
Munich to study philosophy. After this, he studied medicine at Frankfurt
University. By the time he had finished his medical studies, his beliefs were
starting to show in a NaziGermany
where racism was rife. His dissertation was a study into the differences in the
lower jaw between different racial groups.

In 1937, Mengele joined the
Nazi Party and one year later he joined the SS. Mengele fought in the Russian
campaign but he was so badly wounded that he was considered unfit for frontline
military service. After recovering from his wounded, Mengele volunteered to work
in concentration camps. He was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It was Mengele who is
principally associated with selecting those who were gassed on arrival and those
who survived. Known as the "Angel of Death", a flick of the wrist
immediately condemned some to the gas chambers, while others were deemed able to
work for a while before being murdered. In his 21 months at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Mengele was a regular figure on the platform when the trains came. Those who
survived the camp, remember Mengele as being immaculately dressed as he
indicated those who should go to the left (immediately to the gas chambers) of
him, and those who should go to the right - to work.

Stories of Mengele's
cruelty abound. On one occasion, it is said that a blockhouse housing 750 women
became infested with lice. Mengele ordered that all of the women in the hut
should be gassed and then the blockhouse should be deloused. Another story
states that he condemned a whole train load of Jews to be instantly gassed when
a mother refused to be separated from her daughter and attacked a SS guard who
tried to separate them.

However, it is his
experiments on twins that have condemned Mengele to infamy. Mengele was
fascinated by the study of genes and he wanted to find out if he could 'change'
identical sets of twins by operating on them and performing experiments on them
that had no scientific basis. There can be no doubting the known outcome of such
experiments as Mengele built his laboratory next to one of the crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mengele experimented on
three thousand sets of twins at the camp. Before they were experimented on,
Mengele did all in his power to calm them. The children were given clean clothes
and sweets. They were allowed to call him "Uncle". They were driven to
his laboratory in either his own staff car or in a truck with a red cross
painted on the side. They were then subjected to appalling experiments - surgery
without anesthetics, blood transfusions from one twin to the other, the
deliberate injecting of lethal germs into the twins, sex change
operations.

Mengele sent all his
findings to his mentor Dr Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. It took two
trucks to carry all of his 'findings'. Verschuer destroyed them - so the full
extent of what Mengele did at Auschwitz will never be known. If Mengele himself
kept any notes, they have never been found.

As the Russians advanced
towards Poland, and it became clear that the Germans were losing the war on the
Eastern Front, many records at Auschwitz-Birkenau
were destroyed by the SS guards there. They then disguised themselves in a
variety of ways. Mengele became a German infantry soldier as he moved west. As
he moved west away from the Russians, he also did work at camps at Gross-Rosen
and Matthausen. Mengele was captured as a German infantry soldier near Munich.
The Allies released him as there seemed little point in keeping in custody an
infantryman. Mengele had managed to disguise himself well. After the war,
Mengele managed to avoid arrest by keeping a very low profile. However, by 1948,
he decided that his future lay elsewhere and not Germany.

Mengele decided to go to
Argentina. He was unwittingly helped in this by the International Committee of
the Red Cross who provided travel papers for people as a humanitarian gesture.
With a false name, identity and Italian residency papers, Mengele moved to
Argentina in 1949. He moved from one South American country to another to
avoid being captured like Adolf Eichmann. He
also lived under a number of aliases.

In 1979, while swimming in
the sea in Brazil, Mengele suffered a stoke and drowned. He was buried as
'Wolfgang Gerhard' at Embu. However, his family later admitted that they had
sheltered him and that Wolgang Erhard was indeed Mengele. In 1992, DNA samples
from the body matched those of his son and wife.